


the art of good bones

by ilgaksu



Category: All For the Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-15
Updated: 2016-09-15
Packaged: 2018-08-15 05:45:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8044660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: Stuart Hatford had always loved his sister. His sister's son was secondary.





	the art of good bones

**Author's Note:**

  * For [badacts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/badacts/gifts).



Stuart Hatford had always loved his sister. They were twins, born on the same day, drawing breath in the wake of each other. Their street was not a nice street, years before postcode wars and Russian millionaires buying out shards of the city. Their street was not a nice street, until suddenly it was: until suddenly there was money for school trips, school books, a better school, where they taught Latin and how to conjugate and Stuart taught a baying classroom how to break bones.

His sister, tall and elegantly-boned, sat bored in the Girls' Division, walked home with her skirt tucked up short and her eyes alight with dreams, her cardigan pockets overflowing with love notes and stolen penny chews. She knew they had the money for the latter and didn't care.

"Don't you like getting away with it?" she'd said to Stuart one day, eyes on fire and hair lit up like a poor girl's cheap halo in the dying light.

Years later, she would meet Nathan on her post-graduation gap year. He would weight her hands down with rings and put his hands on her throat when he kissed her and he thought this was how to tie a girl like her down. He would put a child in her and she would claw them both out of his house and she would ring Stuart, clipped and breathless, outside a gas station.

"Get me out of the God-damned colonies," she said. "Junior is in the backseat."

"Get him a new name."

"Get me a secure line," she snapped, then "Get me out of here. Get us out of here."

Mary Hatford didn't say please. It wasn't her style. She got closer than she ever had in the heavy static. The curse and cure of twins: you have never been closer to another human being. You may never be again.

"I'll wait for you at the airport," Stuart promised, and she hung up.

*

Stuart Hatford had always loved his sister. It was the way they had been made, a family trade, a family business, a family sinks or swims by each other. His sister's son was secondary. Stuart meets Nathaniel for the first time since the boy's christening. He is sullen with baby fat and fear. He leans into Mary's side, half-dead on his feet but still standing, and doesn't complain once. His eyes, when they snap up to Stuart 's, are ice.

"It's nice to meet you, Uncle," he says, and Stuart can't tell if the kid means it. He watches him watch all the exits.

Stuart approves.

"He's got his eyes," he tells Mary later. It's a warning. She sighs, picks up her glass of Chardonnay, and then pitches it directly into the wall.

"Nathaniel is not his father's," she hisses, "My labour was twenty hours. They cut him out of me. He is _not_  his father's," and then begins to cry.

Stuart lets her. She has been away from home for seventeen years. He turns his face away to give her some privacy.

He hears the floorboards creak.

"Not quiet enough, little mouse," he says, turning towards a ten-year-old Nathaniel trembling with rage in his parlour doorway. His eyes are narrowed and his colour is high. He doesn't get that from them, Stuart thinks idly. There is a penknife in Nathaniel 's hand.

"What did you do to her," he snarls, his voice years from breaking but made hoarse with disuse.

His eyes are burning. Stuart laughs.

Nathaniel readjusts his grip on the penknife, shifts his stance, licks his lips. His eyes dart to Mary, who swallowed the worst of the tears back down when she saw him in the doorway. She smiles, a small and tremulous thing, and holds out her arms. Nathaniel goes to her. He hugs her one-armed. He doesn't let go of the knife. He doesn't close his eyes. He can barely see over her shoulder, small for his age, but he looks, unblinking as a lizard, at Stuart.

"Don't trust your own flesh and blood, little mouse?"

Nathaniel sets his jaw. In that instant, Stuart feels like he glimpses something in the set of Nathaniel's bones, something fleeting and important about his sister Mary's son. But then it is gone.

And Nathaniel says, "No."

*

Nathaniel is nineteen in Baltimore. He looks up at Stuart, over his father's body with his father's eyes. Mary used to love those eyes once. Stuart looks at the blood and the ruin, the shattered architecture of Nathaniel's elegant bones, the last remnant of his mother's birthright. He thinks for the first time in years about stolen penny chews, about Mary's voice. 

We don't get away with anything in this world. God always comes knocking. There is always a debt collector.

"She's dead," Nathaniel says. His voice, old enough now for breaking, does.

"I'm sorry, little mouse," Stuart tells him. He means it. He has to leave before he can hear the sirens, but he cannot seem to tear himself away.

He's done what Mary asked. He's discharged. It all feels very hollow.

"So am I," Nathaniel replies.

*

Stuart pays the hospital bill after Baltimore. The States are so ugly about recovery. He filters it through twelve proxy accounts; the final one's sort code is Nathaniel Wesninski's birthdate. The account number is Mary's.  _They had to cut him out of me._

Nathaniel has always been the last of the Hatford legacy. He has always been his mother's son.

He knows Nathaniel will get the message.

*

On the anniversary of the day Mary Hatford married Nathan Wesninski, in a white veil with her groom's cold - star eyes smiling, Neil Josten wins a gold medal as starting striker for the US Olympic team.

When he smiles, you can see his mother's bones. To his side, a young blonde man frowns and catches his breath. Stuart has seen him before, naturally. He does his research.

Apparently, the boy has a twin. It almost makes him laugh. He doesn't know if Nathaniel knows the significance of the date, but Stuart is growing older. He isn't the boy who fought in schoolyards anymore. Some days you leave to rot.

Stuart watches the whole match.

Mary would have killed her boy for this, he thinks, whilst onscreen they replay the moment the buzzer sounded. One of his teammates drops to the ground, but Nathaniel doesn't. Nathaniel stays standing, his head thrown back, clawing for each breath. Hatfords die on their feet. Nathaniel sways briefly. The blonde man steadies him sharply, the turn of his face to Nathaniel like the slice of a blade.

 _He is not his father's,_ Mary says, when Nathaniel is ten and his hands shake around a Swiss Army knife.

Stuart watches Nathaniel's face, livid and alive, as he bows his neck for the medal. He thinks he's inclined to agree.


End file.
